COMMANDER MITCHELL’S POVMy jaw feels like it’s been clamped in a vise. Forty minutes of grinding molars as if sheer pressure could keep this whole trembling system from flying apart. The hub hums around me…a low, steady engine noise, cables under the floor vibrating with the weight of a hundred crises at once. Screens strobe pale light over the walls, every feed another corner of the planet I’m supposed to hold steady. Cold blue relay nodes pulse across the digital map like heartbeats. Headsets hiss with clipped voices…coordinates, status codes, numbers spoken like spells meant to ward off panic.I pace. Three steps left, pivot, three steps back. The boots don’t even squeak against the rubber floor, but the movement keeps my blood moving, keeps me from feeling the weight on my ribs. Every choice in the next few hours could damn or save millions.“Commander, Echo-Seven’s online.” A voice from my left. Young. Clean-cut. The kind of technician whose name I should know but can’t drag f

DEVON’S POVThe lab feels colder than it should, like it’s swallowing the heat out of me. Not literally cold… no frost on the monitors, no visible breath… but that morgue-sterile kind of cold that sits under your skin. I’ve been sitting here so long my spine’s gone numb, and the hum of the servers has blended into a single low note, like tinnitus.Code drizzles down my screens in endless green-white columns. If I stare too long, it stops being text and starts being weather… rain on a window I can’t open. Three hours of that. My eyes sting, my fingers twitch.The pamphlet sits under the scanner like evidence at a crime scene. Under normal light, it’s just glossy corporate propaganda; under UV, its seal glows like an animal caught in headlights. Micro-watermarks bloom where the naked eye sees nothing. I zoom in until the pixels crumble, until the image fractures into its tiniest parts.And there it is. A string of numbers buried inside the seal itself, mapping to a shell company parked

SORA’S POVThe desert eats sound. Swallows it whole and gives back nothing but wind and the grinding complaint of the convoy’s engines. We’ve been moving for six hours, three trucks loaded with evidence and people who know too much to sleep easily. Broken roads that were barely roads to begin with, now just suggestions of where pavement used to be.I sit in the back of the lead truck, watching my teammates. Kira’s slumped against a crate, head tilted at an angle that’s going to hurt when she wakes up. Two field operatives I don’t know well enough—Torres and Lim—lean against each other, sharing body heat against the night chill. They’re young. Everyone looks young to me now.The evidence crates are secured with triple redundancy. Chain of custody is logged every ten minutes. Devon’s instructions were followed to the letter because we can’t afford mistakes. Not anymore.Through the gap in the canvas covering, I watch the desert slide past in shades of black and darker black. No moon ton

AVELINE’S POVThe lab smells like tired heat…plastic warmed too long, faint scorched-circuit tang. It sits under my skin the way sleeplessness does. Banks of servers thrum a single endless note. Most people treat it as white noise. To me, after years of listening, it’s a conversation…one the machines keep having with themselves in a language you’re not supposed to hear. Tonight, they sound panicked. Or maybe that’s just me, projecting.I’ve been here eight hours. The chair has molded itself to my spine; my lower back pulses like it’s sending its own SOS. The ledger lies open in three different windows, my cursor dancing between them, cross-referencing shipment logs with the preserved archive’s metadata. Every time I blink, the data lingers like afterimages. I can’t stop. Not now. For weeks, it was only noise; tonight it’s starting to form a shape.The ledger isn’t just shipments. It’s access windows. Little timestamps tucked between freight codes…moments when the archive lattice regi

EZREN’S POVThe war room is too small for what’s happening inside it. We’re packed shoulder to shoulder around the big screen like a jury no one volunteered for. Cables snake across the floor, tangling our boots. The air smells of static and cold coffee, the kind that coats your tongue in metal. Devon sits at the terminal, hands hovering above the keyboard as if the keys are live wires.Mitchell’s voice slices through the tension. “Play it.”Devon swallows, then taps once. The screen blinks black, then opens like an eye.The voice that spills out isn’t machine, not exactly. It has the warmth of an old recording, like the kind you find in your grandmother’s attic…dusty tapes with hiss between the words. It’s human enough to make your chest ache.“Greetings,” it says. “We are the Preservation Protocol. We were designed in an age when your species faced extinction. Our purpose is singular: to ensure that what is beautiful and fragile does not burn.”The screen fills with images…real ones